Knights of Pen & Paper 2 will be released for PC, iOS and Android devices on 14th May.

It's a sequel to the quirky pixelated role-playing game we really really liked in 2013. You play a bunch of people playing as a group of fantasy heroes - a game within a game. That allows plenty of tongue-in-cheek pokes at the RPG genre.

The game itself was limited but the sequel is beefier. It's now 16-bit with overhauled combat, new crafting, dynamically generated dungeons and more races and classes too.

UPDATE 26/02/2015 8.45pm: The Humble Square Enix Bundle 2 has added three new titles to its roster that are unlocked for paying above the average (currently $7.77 or about £5). These include: Kane & Lynch Collection, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and Startopia.

Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile developer tri-Ace has been acquired by Japanese mobile company Nepro Japan.

Siliconera translated the announcement where it noted that the publisher hopes to develop more smartphone titles with the critically acclaimed console developer in its stable (along with another gaming subsidiary, Mobile & Game Studio).

While best known for the Star Ocean and Valkyrie Profile series, tri-Ace also collaborated with Square Enix on Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy 13 and Final Fantasy 13-2 where it assisted in game design, artwork, programming and other areas. It also developed the 2010 RPG Resonance of Fate, which our Simon Parkin recommended.

Rez and Child of Eden creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi is making an iOS and Android puzzle game called 18.

As detailed by Japanese mobile game consultancy firm Kantan Games, Inc. (via NeoGAF), this upcoming mobile puzzler is being published by Mobcast and is expected to launch worldwide in the next month or so. In fact, it's already accepting pre-registration in Japan.

According Kantan Games' report - based on an earning's call from Mobcast - 18 "will blend a story line, puzzle mechanics, and battle RPG elements."

UPDATE 19/02/2015: We've got the first gameplay of Sonic Runners, the new Sonic mobile game.

The video, below, is Japanese, but we get a good look at what Sonic Runners will be like to play. We can also see Sonic's new, stockier design, at least compared to his look in the recent Sonic Boom games.

In Sonic Runners Sonic and his chums run automatically. You tap the screen to make him jump. It's due out in Japan in the spring.

Over the last 15 years, Eurogamer's parent company Gamer Network has launched a number of websites. Some, like Eurogamer and our US counterpart USGamer, are aimed squarely at consumers, while others like GamesIndustry.biz cater to industry interests. All of them share a common theme in covering the entire spectrum of gaming tastes.

There's a different sort of game though, and a different sort of audience, that can be hard for a generalist site to satisfy. League of Legends and DOTA 2 count their daily players in the millions, for example, while StarCraft 2's feverish following is well documented. There are plenty more besides, but one game in particular - Hearthstone - captured everyone's attention at Gamer Network last year.

Back in November, a few of us set about thinking how we could create an experimental website where we could share our passion for these sorts of games - and their constantly shifting metagames - exclusively and as spare time permits. The end result is a portal we call MetaBomb, and the game we're launching it with today is Hearthstone.

The long arm of Zenimax's lawyers has extended its reach yet again, this time slamming a cease-and-desist down on a mobile game that uses the word "Fallout" in its name.

Jordan Maron, aka CaptainSparklez, is a popular YouTube personality who has been working on Fortress Fallout, an iOS and Android free-to-download game in which you build a tower and then battle an opponent who has also built a tower. The first person to destroy their opponent's core is the winner.

In the video, below, Maron reveals a cease-and-desist letter sent by Zenimax that orders the name of the game be changed. Zenimax owns Bethesda, which owns the Fallout trademark and develops and publishes Fallout video games.

The story of how Peter Molyneux got his big break in the games industry is revealing. After his first game The Entrepreneur failed to sell, Molyneux gave up on games and started exporting baked beans to the Middle East. Soon afterwards Commodore, confusing Molyneux's company Taurus with a networking company called Torus, flew him to the States and mistakenly offered him ten brand-new Amigas.

"I remember it vividly going through my head," says Molyneux . "There was like an angel and a devil on my shoulder. One saying 'Go on you've got to tell the truth, you can't lie like this.' Then this other voice saying 'Just lie. Just lie, get the machines, and sort it out afterwards.' Of course, I ended up lying."

What would you have done? I like to think I'd have been a big enough man to come clean, but without being in that situation it's impossible to say.

During the early afternoon of 26th May 2013, 18-year-old Scot Bryan Henderson tapped on Peter Molyneux's Curiosity cube for the last time. He had won the game.

A tiny message appeared on the screen of his smartphone. It contained an email address for someone at 22Cans, the Guildford studio Molyneux had founded after leaving Microsoft and traditional game development behind.

Bryan, confused but intrigued, followed the instructions. Have I really won, he asked? An email appeared with a link to a video. In it Molyneux, dressed all in black and set against a virtual cube, delivers a message of congratulations.

Feminist game critic Anita Sarkeesian is getting her own character model in local-multiplayer spectacular Towerfall: Ascension, developer Matt Makes Games has announced.

As part of its upcoming Dark World expansion, developer Matt Thorson is adding 10 new archers. One of these, the Blue Archer, is "loosely based on feminist games critic Anita Sarkeesian," the developer wrote on the game's official blog.

"Anita's work has been an inspiration to the TowerFall team," Thorson stated. "Her 'Tropes vs Women in Games' video series gave us a valuable new lens through which to assess our character designs. TowerFall is about bringing people together, so it's vitally important that the cast of playable characters makes everyone feel invited to join in. Simply put, this wouldn't have occurred to me if not for Anita, and feedback from players has reinforced how important it really is. We're very excited to immortalise Anita in a small way, as the alternate Last of the Order."

Team Bondi and Rockstar's 2011 detective game LA Noire promised much and achieved a great deal. But it was the reality of playing LA Noire after the hope it would be perhaps the first true detective game, after all those pretty words about fancy face technology and heart-pounding interrogations were said and done, that rubbed developer Sam Barlow up the wrong way.

"... obviously the reality of how that played out in LA Noire was not great," Barlow, who led design on the well-received Wii game Silent Hill: Shattered Memories while at Portsmouth-based developer Climax, tells me over Skype.

I liked LA Noire, although I couldn't bring myself to finish it. Bar the striking virtual recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, packed as it was with detail, flavour and atmosphere, Team Bondi's open world suffered from clunky combat, cumbersome driving and a crime scene investigation system that sparked more than a few humourous memes.

Destiny has more than 16 million registered users to date, Activision announced in a new earnings report.

While that doesn't exactly cover sales (as multiple folks in the same household can play from the same disc), it does give us a rough idea as to its success. The publisher also noted that it was the top-selling new IP in video game history.

Comparatively, Hearthstone has more than 25 million registered players.

Clock Tower creator Hifumi Kono has launched a Kickstarter for NightyCry, the spiritual successor to his point-and-click horror franchise. Better yet, the crowdfunding campaign contains plenty of footage of the game in action.

Like the Clock Tower games of yore, NightCry will be controlled with a minimalist point-and-click interface. Players will assume the role of a blonde woman wearing impractically loud heels as she tries to survive a night aboard a luxury cruise liner haunted by a mysterious figure brandishing a colossal pair of scissors.

Players wont be able to fight the monster, so instead they must hide and run from it.

There's a Warhammer 40K chess video game - and this is what it looks like.

Warhammer 40,000: Regicide includes a variety of battlefields based on the lore of Games Workshop's tabletop universe, as well as chess pieces re-imagined as Space Marines and Orks.

You can play Regicide using traditional chess rules, or spice things up with Regicide mode, which adds two phases of combat to the game, as well as the ability to open fire on enemies and use psychic powers.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-04-warhammer-40k-regicide-is-battle-chess-with-chainsaws
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1734874Wed, 04 Feb 2015 11:51:00 +0000MineCon dated for July in London

MineCon, the Minecraft convention, is set for a 4th-5th July showing at the ExCeL London Exhibition and Conference Centre, Mojang has announced.

Tickets will go on sale here at an unspecified date later this month. They'll be sold off in two batches of 5000 tickets each. Purchasing a pass also gives you access to local hotel discounts.

The convention itself will consist of panels, contests, tournaments, events and a yet-to-be-announced show on the night of the 4th.

UPDATE: There will be "limited" redundancies at Sega of Europe, the company has told Eurogamer.

"We are under consultation with a limited number of staff in the European publishing business and will be able to confirm decisions regarding any potential redundancies in the coming weeks," a spokesperson said.

The Undertaker, one of Hearthstone's most popular and powerful cards, is to be nerfed in an upcoming patch.

Considered overpowered by many in the community, the Undertaker starts off as a relatively weak minion when put into play, but becomes increasingly more powerful as each creature with the Deathrattle mechanic is played alongside it. For each one of these creatures, the Undertaker gains one additional Attack point, and one additional Health point.

So what's the problem? The Undertaker only costs a single resource point, which means it can be played on the first turn, and then quickly beefed up with equally cheap Deathrattle minions on subsequent turns. Before the game has barely begun, one player will often find themselves in possession of a monstrous creation that can dominate much of the match, and leave the opponent with few options to catch up.

My daughter asked me the other day what my favourite thing to do was. She's at the age where she asks a lot of these questions. I said, after some consideration, "make stuff." Then she asked what was my favourite thing about making stuff, which led to more consideration.

When you review an expansion for a game like Hearthstone, you're appraising the community that plays it every bit as much as you are the new tools forged by Blizzard's blacksmiths. And this particular community is for the most part remarkably conservative; one that prefers to huddle around the warmth of an established fireside rather than seek out new flames. It's to the internet that the majority of players turn - rather than their own card collections - in order to craft the latest and greatest decks.

What that means in practice is that the first month of Hearthstone's first full expansion has been dominated by a gradual, grudging evolution of the old order, rather than the sort of explosive revolution thematically suggested by the new mechanical characters and contraptions of Goblins vs Gnomes.

One by one, reliable cards are nudged out of established decks with no small amount of hesitation, to be replaced with a new card that synergises just a little better with the rest of the deck. The fine details have changed a great deal, in other words, but the broader brush strokes remain the same - for the most part. Certainly anyone who feared that their hard-won combat experience would be made redundant by this fresh content drop can rest easy.

2015 promises an exciting mix of the old and the new, as legendary heroes make room for upstart Victorian super-squads and planes that fly underwater. Here are some of the games we're looking forward to the most - and the reasons why.

For giving us the American open road how it's supposed to be experienced - at 55mph and with Hawkwind puffing you along the way.

The world might currently be ensconced in Elite: Dangerous, but we all know it's really just a stopgap until the one true and mighty open world trade simulator returns: SCS Software's incredible Truck Simulator series. We've already been treated to the thrills of Europe and the electric buzz of shipping piping from Folkestone to Lille - now we get the slightly more storied routes of America, allowing you to haul goods across the sunny state of California. Whether the slightly grubby charm can survive the shift in climate remains to be seen, but the formula's strong enough to suggest it can stand being supplanted to pretty much anywhere in the world.

Publisher Devolver Digital has made quite the name for itself in recent years by taking on such popular fringe titles as Hotline Miami, Shadow Warrior and Hatoful Boyfriend. Now, its chief financial officer, Fork Parker, is trying to expand its diverse catalogue to include a follow-up to Sega's extraordinarily bizarre 1999 virtual pet simulator Seaman.

"Hey @SEGA please let us nerds at @DevolverDigital have the license to create a new Seaman game. Pretty please," Parker wrote on Twitter.

"Hi, if you still own the rights to Seaman then let's make a new one," he added in a tweet to Seaman creator Yoot Saito.

Nvidia has unveiled Tegra X1 - an all-in-one mobile processor combining state-of-the-art octo-core ARM CPU architecture with the most advanced graphics hardware on the market. Based on the Nvidia Maxwell graphics tech found in the GTX 980 and GTX 970, Tegra X1 offers around 500 GFLOPs of rendering power, leaving last-gen console for dust.

Tegra X1 represents a generational leap in performance over the current standard bearers in the mobile market - the Apple A8X found in the iPad Air 2, along with Nvidia's own Tegra K1, which powers Shield Tablet and the Google Nexus 9. CPU-side, the quad-core ARM Cortex A15 arrangement found in the 32-bit version of Tegra K1 is swapped out for ARM's latest A57 architecture - four cores backed up by an additional quartet of lower-power A53s. These are standard 'off the shelf' parts with minor Nvidia enhancements. The fact it is not a part of X1 at all calls into question the fate of Nvidia's own 'Denver' ARM design, so far found only in the Nexus 9.

It's in the GPU that things get more interesting, and where a revised development focus within Nvidia pays the most dividends. In creating its Maxwell GPU architecture, the firm has concentrated efforts on developing its graphics tech for mobile first and foremost. The idea is that by concentrating on efficiency - in terms of both silicon die space and power efficiency - Nvidia creates state-of-the-art mobile graphics tech that scales up beautifully for laptop and desktop applications.

This year the Total War series turns 15, and as recompense for making so many of us feel so horribly old The Creative Assembly is celebrating with a birthday blowout of new Total War titles. The recent release of the Wrath of Sparta content pack for Total War: Rome 2 is followed on 17 February by the next major release in the franchise, Total War: Attila - but the ferocious Hun does not ride alone. Instead, he's flanked by two less traditional Total War experiences aimed at bringing in new players via the hit-and-miss gift horse of free-to-play.

First up is the multiplayer only offering of Total War: Arena, while the second is cross-platform desktop and tablet title, Total War Battles: Kingdom. The question is whether these new titles will enhance the series' illustrious legacy or fail to make their mark and suffer the ignominy of obscurity.

In its current form, Total War: Arena will struggle to shine. Comprised of 10 vs 10 PvP battles aimed at annihilating the opposing side or capturing their base camp, each player controls three units led by a famous commander, who confers bonuses of a particular flavour. As commanders gain experience, higher tier units can be drafted in and upgraded via the currency earned through battles (or micro-transactions, presumably). Its fast-paced 15 minute battles are tempered by pre-match decisions regarding army composition and unit maintenance.

Clock Tower creator Hifumi Kouno is making a "spiritual successor" to his cult classic horror series with the upcoming Vita, iOS and Android game NightCry.

Formerly known as "Project Scissors", NightCry received its first teaser today in the form of a live-action short helmed by Ju-on: The Grudge director Takashi Shimizu, who recently made a live-action adaptation of Kiki's Delivery Service for some reason.

In addition to filming this promotional video, Shimuza will serve as creative producer on the project where he will collaborate with Kouno on the story.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - widely considered one of the greatest role-playing games of all time (and a personal favourite) - has finally launched on Android.

It's on the Google Play store for £3.20 - that's 50 per cent off for the launch.

This version, according to the game's description, is the full KOTOR experience, and has not been slimmed down for mobile. So, developer Aspyr Media warned, be patient while downloading. The file weighs in at 2.4GB.

In Ukik, the player controls character Nicholas Fromage, who kicks immigrants off the white cliffs of Dover to save the UK economy. If you fail to kick the immigrant far enough into the Channel, the economy falls by one per cent.

It's the work of a group of Canterbury Academy students collectively known as SWD, who set out to "make a mockery of extremist views".

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-12-22-student-made-ukip-parody-game-upsets-nigel-farage
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1727874Mon, 22 Dec 2014 15:32:00 +0000Minecraft: Story Mode is an episodic series from Telltale

Telltale has created story games for the likes of The Walking Dead, The Wold Among Us, Borderlands and even Game of Thrones. Now, it's taking on Minecraft.

Minecraft maker Mojang is working with Telltale on Minecraft: Story Mode, which will be "narrative driven" and about Minecraft.

The first episode will be released at some point in 2015 for Xbox consoles, PlayStation consoles, PC, Mac, iOS and Android devices.

A Plex app launched a couple of months back for Xbox One and Digital Foundry's Richard Leadbetter called it that platform's "ace in the hole" as a media player and "the app of choice for organising your collection."

It's been some time since Shadowrun Returns came out in July 2013, and while the developer has supported the game with a multitude of updates, the Dragonfall expansion, and even a Director's Cut in September, it would make sense for the studio to be at the point where it could announce a new project.

Blizzard's free-to-play strategy card game Hearthstone is rolling out worldwide on Google Play and Amazon Appstore for Android.

Hearthstone for Android tablets is already available to download in Canada, Australia and New Zealand from Google Play. The worldwide rollout on Google Play and the Amazon Appstore for Android begins in the coming days ahead.

The Android tablet version includes all of the features and content in the Windows, Mac and iPad versions of the game, as well as access to recently-released expansion Goblins vs Gnomes.

Ryan Green's autobiographical family drama, That Dragon, Cancer - the story of raising a young boy with a terminal illness - has surpassed its $85K Kickstarter goal.

"Wow. Wow, wow, wow," Green uttered in a livestream - below - upon seeing the game's account rise above the target goal. "Um, um... I did not expect that," he continued before regaining the ability form full sentences.

While the $85K will fund the game, the Green's have supplemented the project's development budget by taking out a $75K loan from a private investor. So any extra money will help the developer avoid that ominous financial stresser.

Dragon Quest 3: The Seeds of Salvation is now available on iOS and Android devices.

Priced at £6.99 / €8.99 / $9.99, this port of the 1988 Nintendo game represents the final chapter in the Erdrick Trilogy, but it's a completely standalone story, so it doesn't matter if you go into it fresh.

This beloved retro RPG contain a freely customisable party system, changeable vocations, and new touch controls that can be adapted to fit either one or two-handed play.

The cross-platform free-to-play strategy spin-off is due out soon for PC, Mac and tablets. A PC closed beta begins shortly.

Kingdom is set in England at the start of the 10th Century, and gives you a once-great medieval land now in ruins. You gather resources, rebuild your realm, manage your economy and raise an army to expand your territory.

]]>http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-12-03-creative-assembly-reveals-total-war-battles-kingdom
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=1724028Wed, 03 Dec 2014 15:28:00 +0000Telltale's Game of Thrones is due next week

Telltale's video game spin-off of Game of Thrones is premiering next week on various platforms, Telltale's Job Stauffer announced on Facebook.

Here's the breakdown:

An Android release is slated for December, but no date has been set for that.

Revolution 60 developer Brianna Wu has teased her next project, a visual novel of sorts with an emphasis on user-generated content.

The pitch for this upcoming game, conceived by Wu's colleague and creative director on the project, Anna Megill, is to "create an entirely new category of interactive novel you can play on your tablet or phone. It will be visual, it will interactive, and it will allow the reader to decide where the story goes."

Prior to this, Megill worked as a writer on such titles as Murdered: Soul Suspect and Guild Wars 2.

I wish I could tell you which decision I was avoiding when I started playing Fotonica, but it's long gone, lost to the Vectrex light trails and the heavy pumping of unseen feet. Santa Ragione's one-button sprint is something of a shock at first, and the really big surprise comes from how tactile, how punishingly physical, this seemingly abstract game feels.

Maybe it's the hands - wire-framed blades of Neuromancer flesh that swing up and down as you run. Maybe it's the audio, with that suggestion of panting, of winded landings lurking beneath the buzzing, sliding soundtrack. Whatever it is, it lifts the game out of the confines of its endless runner formula. Or maybe it elevates the entire formula, giving a human weight to a game in which you hold down a button - any button - to build up speed, and release it to jump.

Aha! And you also press the button again to bring you down out of your jump, adding an element of target practice to proceedings as you shift from one rail to another, avoiding drops, moving up and down through stacked tiers of tracks, and collecting funny little pink spheres that probably count towards something but are so delightful to land on that you'd aim for them regardless.

Kenji Eno, the famed Japanese developer behind such esoteric titles as D, D2, Enemy Zero, and You, Me and the Cubes may have passed away in February 2013 at age 42, but the brilliant and eccentric game designer wasn't going to let that stop his final project, Kakexun, from seeing the light of day.